Climate change has been the deepest, most challenging cognitive puzzle for humans to untangle these past years. It’s systems on top of systems, with emergent properties that can easily turn intuitive notions into catastrophic dead ends. Every action has a reaction or ten, and improving one part of the system almost invariably leads to weaknesses elsewhere.
Unsurprisingly given the scope of the challenge, complexity theory and “systems thinking” have become critical to comprehending Earth. It also happens to be a popular framework for technologists, fitting well with software engineering and technology products generally as well as society at large. …
